Resolving cases: NAB chief wants pending references heard early

Most references from Lahore pending, least from Sukkur

ISLAMABAD: There are around 1,138 corruption references which are currently pending in different accountability courts of the country and the apex anti-corruption watchdog wants the cases to be heard early to recover looted money.

A high-level meeting at the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) headquarters on Tuesday was told that 347 corruption references from the Lahore Bureau were currently under trial. Moreover, 275 references were from NAB Karachi, 185 references were from NAB Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa,  97 were from NAB Balochistan, 171 were from NAB Rawalpindi, 34 references were from NAB Multan and 29 corruption references were from NAB Sukkur.

In a meeting held on Tuesday to review the progress of the accountability body, NAB Chairman Justice (Retd) Javed Iqbal directed that 499 inquiries and 287 investigations pending in various regional bureaus should be completed at the earliest to recover the looted money.



He also asked the relevant officials why these investigations and inquiries were not finalised within the stipulated time period of 10 months.

“These investigations, inquiries — after a set process was defined — are submitted to the relevant accountability courts in the shape of corruption references,” he said.

The NAB chief further directed that the respective accountability courts should be requested for early hearing of corruption cases so that they could recover the hefty misappropriated amount of Rs900 billion and deposited in the national kitty and punishing the corrupt.

NAB wants ‘accountability for all’

Corruption is a curse which is the root cause of all the ills being faced by Pakistan today. Corruption is the major impediment in the road to progress and prosperity.

This was stated by NAB chief Justice Iqbal, adding that they had devised a proactive anti-corruption strategy to transform the watchdog into a vibrant organisation by adopting a zero-tolerance policy across the board against corruption, introducing a system of self-accountability.

Under the zero-tolerance policy, the NAB chief directed all regional bureaus to catch culprits and investigate without caring about their position so that they could be brought to justice on merit in the light of the available evidence as per law.



NAB, he said, has received 343,356 complaints till 2017 which were processed as per law and had resulted in 2,808 references to recover Rs288 billion in looted money.

In this regard, Justice Iqbal directed to further improve the annual grading system which was devised to evaluate the annual performance of officials. The performance of NAB’s regional bureaus is judged under the grading system on an annual and mid-term basis.

This helps tell the bureaus are not only about their strengths but also about their deficiencies. The system has proved to be quite successful and all regional bureaus work more diligently and on merit to compete with other regional bureaus.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 27^th, 2017.